Maker Faire Shows Off 3D Printing

Each year Maker Faire comes to the Bay Area and it seems the 3D printing exhibit continues to grow in scale. With 120,000 attendees and thousands of makers, it’s a great event.

Our friends at Hack Things went to Maker Faire and wrote this recap.

The section on 3D printing — a tiny part of the entire event — was bigger than what we saw in New York. And even more 3D printers were scattered throughout the exhibition hall. There were some delightful variations.

• A team from Berkeley demonstrated 3D printing with sawdust or cement.
• The SandBox fuses thin layers of sand to create objects. The unfused sand acts as support so any geometry can be created and there’s no need for extra support structures. This mimics a property of the much more expensive SLS (selective laser sintering) technology.
• Fred White showed off his soon-to-be-on-Kickstarter Apex 3D printer head. It can print six separate filaments or fluids simultaneously. As he pointed out, you could print a teacup and fill it with tea in one pass.
• Oleksiy Pikalo has a 3D printer that can draw patterns in carmel in the foam of your latte. He’s working on a version that will work for beer.
• And the Serpentine 3D printer, designed by architecture students, uses clay to rapidly create structures.

Read the full write-up at Hack Things.

Visit the Maker Faire website.

Read more articles about Maker Faire.

Maker Faire is a two-day, family-friendly festival of invention, creativity and resourcefulness, and a celebration of the Maker movement. Maker Faire Bay Area will be held May 19-20.

With 3D printing hitting an inflection point in awareness, it’s not surprising that there are over 20 companies exhibiting at Maker Faire with a 3D printing leaning. From MakerBot to Fab@School, check out the exhibitors below.

 3D Scanning (Structured Light & Laser) Zip-Bit, Inc.
Taking Your Project into the 3rd Dimension with Zip-Bit, Inc. Zip-Bit, Inc. provides 3D Scanning, 3D Modeling, 3D Printing, and 3D Engineering services for all areas of industry/manufacturing, science, education, arts, and more…

 3x3x3 LED Cube Arduino Shield Kit Look What Joey’s Making

3x3x3 LED Cube Arduino Shield Kit is a beginner kit. With this kit you will solder pieces together making the shield. You will then hook it to an Arduino (sold separately) and learn to program it making the leds go on and off in whatever pattern you wish.

Creating a Middle School 3d prototyping lab

Riley & Vernon are ardent CAD designers, 3D Printer users and above all Makers. Come see how they managed to set up a lab on a shoestring and make 3D work a part of everyday school life at a public school.

 Ecological 3D Printing-Research

A research team from the College of Environmental Design at UC Berkeley, led by Assistant Professor of Architecture Ronald Real, has developed a process for the creation of 3D printed buildings, building components, and interior accessories.

 Extreme Marshmallow Cannon

Extreme Marshmallow Cannon uses PVC to hold air pressure, a sprinkler valve to release air & a bike pump. Marshmallows go in the end of the cannon. Pump it using a bike pump to 30psi & fire. The marshmallow will travel about 176 feet.

 Math Sculptures & Hyperbolic Jewelry

The models were created through authentic computational design based on algorithms aimed to generate objects according to the mathematical laws. The 3D printing machine composes the piece from steel powder and infiltrates it with molten bronze.

 QU-BD 3D Printer & Milling Machine

We are excited to announce world’s first desktop manufacturing machine with the capability to do additive AND subtractive manufacturing will be introduced at Makerfaire! We will see you there!

 Applied Science Research and Robotics

Students from AS&E at Menlo School present the robotic arm, a sensing Teddy bear, superconducting MagLev train, Sumo wrestling robots, self-directing car, cloud chamber, hover craft, motorcycle conversion projects, and many more!

Bay Area RepRap Users Group

Public users group for the promotion, development, and understanding of RepRap and RepStrap 3D printer projects in the Bay Area.

 Fab@Home and Fab@School Project

Fab@Home is a platform of printers and programs which can produce functional 3D objects. It is designed to fit on your desktop and within your budget. Fab@Home is innovating tomorrow, today. Join us, and Make Anything.

Hacker Dojo

The Hacker Dojo is a place for makers and hackers to gather and share ideas, collaborate on projects, and build community. We provide facilities and instruction for both software and hardware, open to anyone.

 Klein Bottles, topless teapots, siphon-glasses, and a homebrew forklift

How do you make a glass Klein Bottle? How about knitting a woolen Mobius Scarf? Perhaps a self-syphoning wine-glass? Or a robotic mini-forklift? Cliff will give away a glass Klein Bottle; maybe two if there’s enough questions.

 Knightqueen

Knightqueen is a novelty chess piece that is a hybrid of a queen and a knight. You can write funny words onto the box and give Knightqueen to your friend. Examples: “Garry Kasparov’s worst nightmare” or “Use if you want to beat ME.”

 Low Cost 3D Scanner

Seikowave’s 3D scanner captures images in under 0.5sec with a resolution of 300 microns. Those images, saved as an .STL file, are ready to be exported to a 3D printer or CAM for fabrication. Seikowave will be offering free scans in its booth.

 MakerBot Industries

The MakerBot Replicator is an affordable, open source 3D printer, with 2-color printing and a bigger printing footprint, giving you the superpower to print things BIG!

 Mike’s ORDish Bot 3D Printer
The ORD Bot is a RepRap style 3D printer using MakerSlide for linear movement.

 Printrbot
Printrbot: Your First 3D Printer
Expandable 3D printer kits

 QU-BD 3D Printer & Milling Machine
We are excited to announce world’s first desktop manufacturing machine with the capability to do additive AND subtractive manufacturing will be introduced at Makerfaire! We will see you there!

SparkLab: an educational build-mobile!

SparkLab is a big red truck filled with cutting-edge maker tools that goes from school to school, bringing the joy of making back to kids.

 TechZoneCommunications
We stumbled upon the Open Source Rep Rap Project a few years ago.. We became very interested in building our own and could not source all the parts. So we began assembling and selling electronics and eventually moved into selling complete kits.

 Tjiko Snap! 3D Printer
The Tjiko 3D printer uses no screws or nuts, just lasercut mortise & tenon joints to go together. This means that the only tools you need to get started building are your hands, and a brain or two.

 Type A Machines

A San Francisco startup, building 3D printers! All about open source hardware and cool design.

Maker Faire photo by twelves via Creative Commons.